Pages

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Maze

Multi-Dimensional Maze 1981

When I was in primary school, when I wasn’t running around the bush and climbing trees, I would spend quite a bit of time indoors creating complex mazes, for myself, and others to solve. Sometimes, I would create large mazes by joining lots of mini mazes together – lots of note paper and sticky tape. In high school I was quite interested in Op art, especially Bridget Riley’s stuff – I think I could see that my mazes had developed an optical effect. In grade nine and ten I started to experiment with little optical art works – none of which survive. The above maze was drawn at art college for an assignment on game making - it is what I call a multi-dimensional maze. Below is two close-ups of the above complex maze – the maze is actually about 90x60cm in size and drawn with a Rapidograph pen on illustration board.

Over the last 30 years, my interest in mazes has declined as my interest in art has grown, but I have drawn the occasional artwork that contains a maze – either in the background or as a feature – here is one example. EE Pencil (now Staedler 9B), and acrylic paint on cartridge paper.

East West 1987

Both of these mazes are solvable – the multi-dimensional maze is solvable on a few different levels.